The Minimalist Guide to Making Money Online

Making money online, for most people means escaping their 9 to 5 job, working from the comfort of their own home and ultimately the freedom of location.

People’s desire for earning an online income is very evident, you will notice this by doing a simple Google search.

But the fact is that the majority of people are scared about starting an online business. They think about the money they need to invest, the technical know-how, the time it takes to earn money and a lot of other reasons which are just too many to mention right now.

In this post, which is called “The Minimalist Guide to Making Money Online” for a reason I’m going to share with you a simple way to earn extra money online. But before I get into the meat of this post I just want to mention that this isn’t something new or some “loop-hole”, “guru secret” or any other sort of hyped up guide.

Why minimalist? Because:

You don’t need a website.

You don’t need to sell anything.

You don’t need an email list.

You don’t need an Adsense account.

You don’t need to spend 1 cent.

And the best part is that it’s residual income or passive income or whatever you want to call it.

So what am I talking about here?

Ad revenue sharing websites.

If you’ve never heard about revenue sharing sites before, here is a simple explanation.

They’re basically article directories, for which you can write articles on almost any topic. They place Adsense ads on your live article pages for which you will receive a share of the earnings those ad blocks generate.

Although most revenue sharing sites require you to have an approved Adsense account, I’ve been doing some research and found one who will give you a 75% cut and you don’t even need to have an Adsense account approved. You may have heard about this website before, it’s called InfoBarrel.

Getting started

Once you’ve got your account set up and you’ve completed your profile it’s time to figure out what you should write about.

Although, before you start writing articles it would be a good idea to read InfoBarrel’s author guidelines, just to make sure you aren’t breaking any rules which might get your account suspended or your article submissions denied.

When it comes to creating content a lot of people find it really hard to come up with topics on which they can write articles about.

So I’m going to give you a few suggestions on how to find good topics to write about.

1. Google Trends

Google Trends hot searches is where you will find which are the most searched topics on Google on a daily basis. You can use these topics as a base for your articles. Mostly you’ll see searches on celebrity gossip, tech, sports, gaming and breaking news, which are all topics that people will always be interested in.

2. List Posts

List posts are always a good choice for articles, they’re also very easy to write. Top 10 posts are known for their viral nature and the possibilities are endless. Think about it, Top 10 Movies – Scary Movies – Thrillers… You can easily come up with at least a dozen top 10 lists in less than 5 minutes.

Just put “top 10″ without the quotation marks in the keyword field and tick the box that says “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms”, this way Google will only show you the searched keyphrases that have your keyword in them. Also make sure that the match type is set to [Exact].

At the start of each month the InfoBarrel admins post an article with the editorial calendar for the coming month. Here you’ll be able to find 30 article topics you can write on with the possibility of getting your article featured on the home page.

4. Stick to what’s working

You’ve probably heard about the 80/20 rule, which states that 20% of your work generates 80% of the results.

The same rule can be applied to writing articles. The fact is 20% of your articles will probably generate 80% of your earnings.

Once you’ve written a couple of articles on different topics check your stats to see which articles are getting more views, more social shares, more ad clicks and stick to those topics.

Getting traffic to your articles

The traffic your articles will generate is what will eventually determine how much money you’ll earn.

Now, since I’m a big fan of SEO and search engine traffic my first suggestion is to choose a target keyword for each of your articles, and optimize your article for your chosen keyword or keyphrase.

Another tip for drawing attention to your articles is to make use of InfoBarrel’s multimedia features. This means adding images and video to your articles.

If you’re writing articles on travelling you also have the possibility to add maps to your articles, to showcase different locations that you’ve mentioned within the article.

One other thing that can generate extra visitors is interlinking your articles. If you have multiple articles on similar topics, always have a link that points from one to the other. The main benefit of interlinking is the link juice which will be flowing through your articles. With time your article pages will get a higher page rank and higher rankings in search engines.

3 Ways you can make money

InfoBarrel gives you 3 possibilities to earn money as a member of their website.

1. Adsense ads

Adsense ad blocks will be placed on your live article pages for which you will receive 75% of all the earnings those ads generate. Now, most revenue sharing sites require you to have your own Adsense account, but this is where InfoBarrel is different.

All you have to do is to send a private message to the admin requesting him to enable this feature for your account, this way you’ll be using InfoBarrel’s Adsense account. It would be best to have a couple of approved articles before contacting him.

2. Amazon inserted products

With each article you have the option to insert Amazon products related to your articles content. You will need an Amazon Associates account to earn money from Amazon’s affiliate program. All you have to do is add your Amazon ID in your advertising profile.

3. Referral program

InfoBarrel also has a referral program allowing you to invite other people to signup for an account. In exchange for this you will earn 2% of the earnings that your referrals generate through their articles. You will find your referral link in your account settings page.

A great way to get referrals is to place your referral link in your author signature which will show in the sidebar next to your article.

Taking Action

I’ve tried to make this guide as comprehensive as I could, to make it easy for you to get started, but it’s your choice whether you take action on what you’ve learned or not.

Yes, you will become my referral if you signup through one of the links in this post, but like I said, it doesn’t cost you anything, you don’t have to build a website… all you have to do is start writing articles, the more you write the more you will earn.

Most beginners in making money online are falling for one scam after another, if you have a friend who’s thinking about earning money online share this post with them, or better yet send them an email with a link to this post, you might be doing them a huge favor and probably saving them some money too.

Comments

I am always on the lookout for ways to increase my online income. I have tried another site similar to this before, it did not really work out for me but I only submitted a handful of articles, maybe didn’t give it enough time. Can you external link to other sites? Such as your blog? Maybe good even if the payouts are minimal to use it as a link?

Yeah you can also have links that point to your website in your signatures which you can create in advance. I’ve read a couple of cool success stories from people who are writing for InfoBarrel and I think if you’re consistent the earnings can add up pretty nice.
Thanks for you comment John, have a great weekend.

I have an account at Infobarrel Philip but stop writing over there because I was using it at that time to build backlinks back when that was the thing to do through the Web 2.0 properties. Gosh, I haven’t been to that site in a few years now it seems.

I appreciate you sharing this with me because I have a few friends who are always looking for ways to start generating some income even if it’s small. It would help them to at least experience this and know that it’s possible. Build up their confidence you know. I think this is a good way to get them started. Like you said, they don’t even need their own site.

I’ve also used InfoBarrel for linking building, when I first found the site since I didn’t have an Adsense account approved. But one article after another they add up.

This post is meant especially for people who are interested in the idea of making money online but they’re worried about not knowing how to build websites or promoting affiliate products.
Thanks for your comment and for sharing my post Adrienne, you’re one of kind.

This is a good way to pick up a little change I guess. Who promotes the article so you get traffic to the post? It seems that the easiest way for the new blogger to get known is to write on other websites. As long as you keep the proper balance between your site and the others it makes perfect sense.

I never knew anything about InfoBarrel. I usually prefer to write on HubPages and Squidoo to get some backlinks and traffic back to my blog, but I might give Infobarrels a try as they have got PR4 rank.